At first glance, these brilliant photos might appear to be shaky images of a distant nebula, but that's just a clever illusion. Photographer Fabian Oefner actually created these images using fiberglass lamps, Photoshop, and a bit of ingenuity.

Just last week, we featured Oefner's trippy photos of ferrofluids, portraying a scientific phenomenon as abstract art. In this series, Nebulae, Oefner instead uses a range of photography tricks to create the impression of a natural image. Using those spindly fiberglass lamps (which are terribly ugly, but I remember loving as a kid), Oefner creates his pseudo space porn by taking long exposures of the lamps moving around a darkened room. He then multiplied portions of the images in Photoshop to lend greater density to the shapes. The results are these beautiful, twinkling images that create the sense of far-off worlds.